Several giant steps taken over the course of a week have made the little remaining hope for a two-state solution more remote than at any time in the 30 years since the Oslo Accords were signed. The impediment is a collaborative effort of intransigent Israeli and Palestinian leadership, and lame encouragement from the United States, Europe and the Arab world.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas let loose another of his diatribes, calling for the United Nations to evict Israel and, using his go-to incendiary response, comparing the Jewish state to the Nazis. Not surprising, given that his doctoral dissertation was “The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.”
In a speech to the United Nations marking the 75th anniversary of Nakba, the catastrophe that the Palestinians and their friends call the establishment of the State of Israel, he rejected any Jewish link to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, saying 30 years of Israeli excavations have failed to find any “evidence or proof of the existence” of a Jewish connection. The site, he declared, “belongs exclusively to the Muslims.”
In Washington, Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution, along with several other strident critics of Israel, memorializing the Nakba.
J Street, the left-of-center pro-Israel pro-peace lobby, expressed its “understanding” of the Palestinians’ “sense of loss” and expressed “hope” that the Jewish state will “acknowledge” Palestinians’ feelings. It had no response to Abbas’s vitriolic attack on Israel until asked by a reporter four days later, which it then called “outlandish, offensive.”
Responding to Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held this week’s cabinet meeting at the foot of the Temple Mount by the Western Wall and, in his typical history-lecture mode, rightly reminded Abbas of Israel’s 3,000-year history in the City of David, where King Solomon built the First Temple.
If that was too subtle, his thuggish National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir went to the site – the holiest to Jews and third holiest to Muslims – to declare, “We are in charge of Jerusalem and all of the Land of Israel,” while his followers chanted, “Death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn.”
Adding fuel to the fire, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that the government’s “core mission” is to double the settler population on the West Bank to one million over the next two years.
The State Department called Ben-Gvir’s visit “provocative” and repeated US policy that West Bank settlements are an “obstacle” to the two-state solution. Isn’t that the intention?
Israeli-Saudi normalization won't solve the Palestinian conflict
MEANWHILE, 923 miles to the south, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Abbas was lobbying Arab leaders against formal recognition of Israel. He failed to block the 2020 Abraham Accords, which began the normalization of relations as a result of shared economic and security interests. Nearly all Arab leaders have dropped the “Palestinian veto,” which was a promise of no dealing with Israel until the Palestinian question is settled.
Leaders across the Arab world have made little secret of their growing impatience with Palestinian maximalist demands despite their urgings of greater flexibility. But they’re hoisted on their own petards.
What Arab leaders may be ready for their public, the Arab street, is not. It is not simply because they’ve failed to prepare their people for a new reality, so much as the product of years of incitement.
Corrupt and autocratic leaders have long sought to divert public demands for more rights and benefits by blaming the need to focus on defending against the Zionist enemy and its persecution of their Palestinian cousins. Today, when they would like to make peace and do business with the Zionists, they find themselves constrained by their own rhetoric.
The biggest prize in the race for normalization is Saudi Arabia, which is being energetically courted by Israel and Washington. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was in the kingdom earlier this month to try to repair US relations and to press for normalization with Israel by year’s end. Netanyahu will claim it a crowning achievement (puns accepted) that will, in his view, relieve him of pressure to make peace with the Palestinians.
The Biden administration has made Saudi-Israel relations a priority, in no small part because progress toward peace with the Palestinians is many miles beyond remote, and because the president wants to go into his campaign claiming he had expanded the Abraham Accords to include the most powerful Arab state.
The Saudis are asking a high price. They are demanding formal American security guarantees, help in developing a civilian nuclear program, and greater access to top-line American defense systems. They also say no normalization until the Palestinian issue is settled; that may be the hardest to deliver.
The original attraction to engaging with Israel was a mutual defense against Iran (trade and tourism were secondary), but that is changing as the Saudis seek a new rapprochement with Tehran, pursue closer ties China, side with Russia in OPEC oil production decisions against US interests, and most recently welcomed Syria’s Bashar Assad back into the Arab League.
All the deals with the Gulf Arab states won’t solve the fundamental problem of the conflict with the Palestinians, noted former prime minister Ehud Barak, a proponent of the two-state solution.
In a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conversation, Barak said the Abraham Accords “bring out of the closet prior relations but does nothing to change the need to pay attention to the Palestinians. There cannot be peace without ending the occupation, and the way to do that is the two-state solution.
“With 15 million people between the [Mediterranean] sea and the [Jordan] river, if you grant voting rights to the Palestinians you won’t have a Jewish state; and if you won’t grant them voting rights you won’t have a democracy.” A two-state solution is the only way to preserve a Jewish democratic Israel, he added.
Netanyahu’s long wait for an invitation to the White House just got longer with a tough rebuke for violating his commitment to avoid political provocations on the Temple Mount. The State Department condemned Ben-Gvir’s “provocative visit” and “accompanying inflammatory rhetoric.” There was also a separate condemnation of the government’s decision to reoccupy the illegal West Bank outpost of Homesh in violation of Netanyahu’s commitment to the Biden administration.
Netanyahu knows he can cross Biden and there will be no change in the critical defense relationship, and that the $3.8 billion annual aid will still flow; he’ll just have to wait a while longer to be able to publicly lecture the naive, inexperienced, young Joe Biden about the history and realities of foreign policy and the Middle East.
But if he crosses Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and their fellow provocateurs, he could be out of a job. And even go to prison.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant and lobbyist, and a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee legislative director.